page_title: Pugets Sound Agricultural Company
section_title: "The Oragon Beef & Tallow Company"
hierarchical_section_title: Pugets Sound Agricultural Company / Background / "The Oragon Beef & Tallow Company"
caption_attribution_description: English: Painting of a Vaquero in action roping cattle during 1830s Spanish California.
context_page_description: The Puget Sound Agricultural Company, with common variations of the name including Puget Sound or Puget's Sound, was a subsidiary joint stock company formed in 1840 by the Hudson's Bay Company. Its stations operated within the Pacific Northwest, in the HBC administrative division of the Columbia Department. The RAC-HBC Agreement was signed in 1839 between the Russian-American Company and the HBC, with the British to now supply the various trade posts of Russian America. It was hoped by the HBC governing committee that independent American merchants, previously a major source of foodstuffs for the RAC, would be shut out of the Russian markets and leave the Maritime fur trade.
  Because its monopoly licence granted by the British Government forbade any activity besides the fur trade, the HBC created the PSAC to sidestep this issue. The PSAC was formed to produce or manufacture enough agricultural and livestock products to meet the Russian supply demands. In correspondence with British officials, the PSAC was long touted as a means to promote the British position in the Oregon boundary dispute with the United States.
context_section_description: The Alta Californian hide and tallow trade greatly influenced John McLoughlin. In 1832 convinced fellow HBC officers and employees in the Columbia Department to create a new joint stock company to purchase several hundred cattle from Alta California. Called "The Oragon Beef & Tallow Company," as McLoughlin told his superiors, it was formed "with the view of opening from the Oragon Country an export trade with England and elsewhere in tallow, beef, hides, horns, &c." If the cattle were gathered from Alta California in 1833, McLoughlin projected Fort Vancouver area to have a herd of over 5,000 by 1842. Additionally, he considered pointed out favorable locations to host these numerous bovines. The valleys of the Willamette, Cowlitz and Columbia were all deemed as appropriate to host upwards of half a million livestock.
  The proposal was immediately derided and denied by the HBC governing committee. They feared that if the Oragon Beef and Tallow Company were successful then HBC members would quit the fur trade to become pastoralists and agriculturalists. While Simpson was favorable to the idea of growing expansive numbers of livestock and farmlands, he was decidedly against McLoughlin's stance of independent men supplying the provisions for trade in Russian America and the Kingdom of Hawaii. Late in 1834, agreeing to Simpson's idea of the HBC directly overseeing these proposed operations, the committee considered a new central depot for operations on the Pacific Coast. Previous outbreaks of disease at Fort Vancouver worried the administrators, who ordered McLoughlin thoroughly examine Whidbey Island and other potential locations north of the Columbia River, although he had done neither by 1837.
caption: The large herds of cattle owned by Californios in Alta California and the products derived from the animals were popular trade goods. This later helped convince the HBC to establish their own livestock venture on the Pacific Coast.
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